This is a great take. Just like learning anything else, getting context and foundational software engineering knowledge helps accelerate further learning.
I would never counsel a beginning programmer to learn vim first, but after 6 months or so when they have their bearings, it can help text editing speed immensely. Is that the biggest problem a new dev has? It depends, but probably not. Their time is probably better spent getting up to speed on software engineering concepts and practices.
"Text editing speed" is my per peeve in this field.
If your productivity is mostly limited by your typing speed you're either deluded or the greatest 1000x coder in the world.
I spend most of my time thinking and slowly prototyping the issue. It's not like I have the code 100% ready and my mind and just need to type it out as fast as possible and it'll Just Work after that.
And if it's speed of generating code you want, you can use templates in IDEs for it instead of going ":as12#:asd" in vim. Or use Copilot or a similar system to generate the rough outline and finish it up yourself.
I would never counsel a beginning programmer to learn vim first, but after 6 months or so when they have their bearings, it can help text editing speed immensely. Is that the biggest problem a new dev has? It depends, but probably not. Their time is probably better spent getting up to speed on software engineering concepts and practices.